Google wants to rival Facebook with "Maka-Maka"

It’s not, as I thought, the phonetic spelling of the noise Pac-Man makes when eating dots, and neither is it chanted by devout Paul McCartney fans (well, it might be I suppose).

In fact, it’s the working title of Google’s “we didn’t get a share of Facebook so we’ll do our own version” project, set to be officially announced sometime next week, but as with most things these days, leaked out early online.

TechCrunch goes into quite considerable detail about what it could all mean, and how Google will build an open system interfacing with Orkut, its existing social networking site with a big following outside the US (24.6 million global visitors, monthly, to be more precise), and some of Google’s other projects such as their personalised home page iGoogle.

Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. The first peek will come in early November. As we reported previously, Google is planning to “out open” Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to builds for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well.

It sounds interesting, particularly as Google isn’t merely trying to clone Facebook, but use its huge sphere of influence (a lot of people use a lot of Google’s applications daily, and Google hold a lot of personal information) to create some mammoth social system.